Autor/-in: Xenia Benivolski

Xenia Benivolski is a Canadian writer and scholar working across sound studies, material culture, and visual art at LUCA and KU Leuven in Brussels, where she is completing The Sky Is a Bell-the Moon Is Its Tongue, a project examining the church bell as a political instrument connecting the underground to the cosmic, aural, and divine. Between 2021 and 2023, she curated You Can't Trust Music at e-flux, a research project and digital exhibition bringing together sound-based artists, musicians, writers, and thinkers whose work considers how landscape, acoustics, and musical thought contribute to the formation of social and political structures. Her research traces the material and ideological lives of musical instruments and compositions, considering how they act as agents of spiritual and territorial transformation and register as living, sculptural forms. Broader interests include the ontological status of the voice, the metabolism of monumental form, and the acoustics of memory and violence. Her writing on music and visual art appears regularly in Frieze, The Wire, and e-flux journal.